Sony advances the Supercomputer - rumor US govt to buy millions of ps4s

[Netyaroze]

Deyon said:

I'm not surprised by this rumor. The same thing happened with the PlayStation 3

In 2010 the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) created a powerful supercomputer by connecting together 1,760 Sony PS3s which include 168 separate graphical processing units and 84 coordinating servers in a parallel array capable of performing 500 trillion floating-point operations per second (500 TFLOPS). As built the Condor Cluster was the 33rd largest supercomputer in the world and would be used to analyse high definition satellite imagery.

This won't happen again. Because the Cell was in 2006 really something else and the PS3 offered a Cell for 500 while IBM offered a slightly better Cell based systeml for 5-6 times that. The Cell was an excellent Supercomputer Prozessor and Sony made a huge loss while selling it and GPU Supercomputers were not known. IBM even complained that Sony cut into their Servermarket The Cell offered a good balance of Cpu and Gpu. Later came GPGPU and made GPUs interesting. 2-4 PS4 for 400-500 Dollars gives you less bang for the buck than a Geforce Titan or Tesla Card.

 

We won't see any PS4 Supercomputers because this time you can get better and cheaper GPUs and CPUs for Supercomputer. The Cell was an exception.